Links: Catan Converts, Oath Makers, and Victory Considerations

In 2016, Leder resigned from his data business analyst job at Macalester College. He had other things on his mind. "There was an understanding and I quit my day job," Leder recalled last week. "I wasn't into it anymore. They knew that and thought I should get going. I wanted to publish board games."

And things are going pretty well.

Leder Games, based in St. Paul's Midway, expects revenue approaching $7 million this year from popular games Leder financed with several million bucks raised on Kickstarter.

Leder started noodling with board games in 2001 in his free time. During a period of unemployment in the early 2000s, he started designing a prototype.

"My brother once said that whatever you find yourself doing after three or four months of unemployment is what you should do for the rest of your life," Leder recalled. "But I had to find another job. I hadn't developed the right skills yet and my salesmanship skills were horrible."

To try to gain a better understanding of the game — and why a 21-year-old NBA player loves it so much — I asked Williams if he would teach me, with help from two reporters who already knew how to play...

While we played, Williams couldn't help but tell stories from his time at Tennessee.

He recounted some of the custom rules they instituted, from future trades to blind trades to a shot clock. He remembered the time [teammate Brad] Woodson didn't speak to him for almost a week and a half because he had cut him off in three straight games, thwarting his efforts to build. And the time they made a bet in which the losers had to prank call their coach, Rick Barnes.